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GIBRAN AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON:

THE PROBLEM OF THE PROPHET1 IRFAN SHAHID Celebrated six years ago was the hundredth anniversary of the arrival at these American shores of Gibran Kahlil Gibran, the fore- most Arab-American writer.2 Twenty-eight years after his advent in 1895, a slim volume of his, less than a hundred pages, which could be read in an hour, appeared in print titled The Prophet?

It received a wide and immediate vogue and its popularity has not waned in the course of the last eight decades or so since its publication.

The sale of the book ran into the millions, more than eight according to the most reliable estimate.4 Thus, The Prophet outsold all American poets from Whitman to Eliot. According to its publisher, Alfred Knopf, the book's success was entirely due to its own appeal since no publicity whatsoever has ever been mounted to promote its sale.

In addition to the sale of these millions of copies, the book has been translated into all major and some minor languages of the world, according to some estimates into fifty.5 Consequently, Gibran is the only Arab or Arabic-speaking author who succeeded in authoring a book that has had this extensive presence in the four corners of the earth. Although he was by birth a Lebanese Arabic-speaking writer, 1 This article is based on a paper delivered at the Library of Congress Arab- American Cultural Relations Conference, September 1995 and is published by per- mission of the Library of Congress, granted on the 23rd of July, 1997.

2 The bibliography on Gibran is extensive and is still growing.

See Fawzi Abdulrazzak, "Adab al-Mahjar: Bibliyugrafiyyah," Mundus Arabicus I (Cambridge, 1981):

89-230; for studies in English and other Western Languages, see Francine H.

McNulty, ibid., 65-88 and Jean Gibran and Kahlil Gibran, Kahlil Gibran:

His Life and World (New York: Interlink Books, 1974, reprint 1991), 446-451.

3 Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1923).

4 This figure was supplied by Alfred Knopf's publicity department on May 24, 1991.

I am grateful to my student David Marcus at Georgetown for making the inquiry.

3 See the article of the scholar whom this Festschrift honors, "The Contributions of Arab Immigrants in North America to Arabic Literature," The First One Hundred Years:

A Centennial Anthology Celebrating Antiochian Orthodoxy in North America., ed.

George S.

Corey, et al.

(Englewood, N.J.: Antakya Press, 1995), 86.

Tradition, modernity, and postmodernity in Arabic literature : Essays in honor of professor Issa J. Boullata, edited by K. Abdel-Malek, and W.B. Hallaq, BRILL, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=253466.

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322 IRFAN SHAHID he spent almost three-quarters of his short life on earth in America,6 where he wrote his masterpiece The Prophet, not in Arabic his mother tongue, but in English, the language of the country of which he became a naturalized citizen, amid the challenges of the American scene, and where the millions of copies have sold and are still being sold; and it was an American writer that fifty translators or so deemed worthy of rendition into their respective languages.

And yet this book, the reputation of which has become truly global as an American classic, has been snubbed by the Grove of Akademe in the United States.

The Ivy League universities do not teach him as an American author, let alone as a classic; he has never been allowed admission to the Canon and his place is neither in the "Grove, nor in the Garden, nor in the Stoa, nor in the Tub," but is in the Agora, to which he is consigned or ostracized, by the umpires of literary taste in the Establishment. Even the most American of all philosophies, namely Pragmatism, has not been applied to him:

the philosophy that judges the truth of any system by its success and how it works in practice; and that, on the strength of the millions of copies sold, should have elevated him to a higher level of literary standing.

Not only has he been banished from the Canon and from university syllabi, but also from standard anthologies of American literature.

The latest and the most prestigious, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, does not include him.7 And this is not a slim anthology, but one that con- sists of two thick volumes, a work of some five thousand pages, with- out a single page from Gibran, while it includes works, the Americanism of which are perhaps not as strong as that of Gibran's The Prophet.

Jose Marti was a distinguished Cuban writer; although he lived in America for a short time, yet he wrote in Spanish and his Neustra America is included and so are a number of corridos, Spanish Mexican ballads or songs all translated from Spanish.

The process of ban- ishing Gibran from the mainstream of American literature or even 6 Born in 1883 and died in 1931.

7 The Heath Anthology of American Literature (Lexington, Massachusetts:

Heath and Company, 1994), vol. I-II.

For Nuestra America, that challenging and remarkable essay, see vol.

II, 821-828; for the corridos, 828-845.

My colleagues in the Spanish Department at Georgetown tell me that Neustra America was originally written in Spanish.

The non-inclusion of Gibran, or at least a selection from his writings is truly surprising, especially as this anthology is known for its multi-cultural inclu- sions, reflecting the ethnic diversity of America; cf. the inclusion of FitzGerald in his entirety in another anthology; infra n. 19.

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GIBRAN AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON 323 consciousness is reflected also in his non-inclusion in The Dictionary of American Biography, The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, and Who's Who in America.8 Surely this is a genuine, not a fictitious, problem or question and it has bearing on the life of the Arab-American community—its cul- tural identity and its place in the multi-ethnic society in America to which it also belongs.

The problem has relevance to the concept of emigre and comparative literature in general.

In fact it invites com- parison with one of the most outstanding examples of the success of an emigre writer, Joseph Conrad, the Pole, who was given a warm embrace by the English Establishment, thus contrasting with the cold shoulder given Gibran by the American.

This article is divided into two parts:

in the first, will be exam- ined whatever legitimate reasons the Establishment has against The Prophet; in the second, the case will be stated for the inclusion of Gibran, if not in the hallowed Canon, at least in anthologies of American Literature.

The cases of three literary artists who attained world-wide celebrity also will be examined because of their relevance to the problem of The Prophet, namely, Frederik Nietzsche, Edward FitzGerald, and T.S. Eliot.

I The reservations or the objections of the Establishment might run along the following lines:

The Prophet does not admit of a satisfactory categorization in terms of recognized literary genres or representation of a well-known school.

It is neither a novel nor a short story nor a long poem.

This con- ception of The Prophet and how it operates to the disadvantage of its author, Gibran, becomes clearer when Gibran is contrasted with another countryman of his, a Lebanese who was accepted immedi- ately by the French Literary Establishment, George Schehade.

By composing in the idiom of the surrealists, he became one of the best representatives of surrealism in modern French literature and almost won the Nobel Prize.

8 Strange enough, the Gibran who is included in "Who's Who" is his namesake, his relative, the sculptor who nowadays lives in Boston and who with his wife Jean co-authored the book on Gibran, cited supra, n. 2.

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324 IRFAN SHAHID 2.

It is probably because of this, that The Prophet in the imagina- tion of the professional literary critic tends to belong to the category of religious literature, which conception assigns its author to the sta- tus of a religious leader or more pejoratively to an Oriental guru rather than a man-of-letters.

His acceptance, especially in religious circles such as the Unitarians, the Friends, and the Baha'is seems to confirm the judgement of the literary critic as to the regions to which The Prophet belongs.

The very title of the book suggests or corrobo- rates this impression as well as the various chapters of the book, which sound as sermonettes delivered from a pulpit.

That this must have been the case is supported by the fact that The Prophet in book- shops is not to be found in the section on literature, but in that of religion.

The best confirmation of this view was, however, the adapta- tion of The Prophet as a religious drama which was presented as such, almost annually at a Christian church in New York, St.

Mark's in- the-Bouwerie, the pastor of which, Dr.

William Norman Guthrie, christ- ened another book of Gibran's, Jesus The Son of Man, as the "Gospel according to Gibran," thus making of Gibran the fifth Evangelist!9 3.

In the Inter-War period, beginning with the twenties, the lit- erary world for a long time to come was in the grip of T.S. Eliot, who, both as poet and critic, revolutionized first English and then world poetry and also created the taste by which the new poetry was to be appreciated. Almost everything he did, and especially his Waste Land, the most influential poem of the twentieth century, pub- lished a year before The Prophet must have disinclined the critics of the Establishment from considering Gibran seriously:

a — Eliot carried an implacable war against the Romantics, accus- ing them of sentimentality and lack of precision in poetic expres- sion.

Gibran was irretrievably a Romantic, and the critics who were speaking the new idiom of Eliot had no use for the Gibranic roman- ticism, especially coming as it did from an outsider, whose very name advertized his otherness.10 9 On this, see Barbara Young, This Man from Lebanon (New York:

Alfred Knopf, 1950), 33. In spite of the fire that Barbara Young's book has been under, it does have valuable data on Gibran, owed only to her.

10 Gibran himself apparently was aware of this when he chose "Gibran" rather than 'Jubran" as the more aesthetic rendition of his name in English.

He also transliterated his middle name not "Khalil," but "Kahlil." More confusion was con- tributed by Antione Karam when he transliterated his name as "Djabran" in the new edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam!

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GIBRAN AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON 325 b - Eliot effected a revolution in the language of English poetry, which, according to him, had become stale and unexciting after the long night of the Romantics and the Victorians; and in the judgement of critics, a great poet is one that develops the powers of expression inherent in a language.

Gibran could hardly be considered an inno- vator in this sense.

The revolution in poetic diction he effected was in Arabic,11 not in English, and his language in The Prophet could not have been considered innovative and revolutionary as that of Eliot.

On the contrary, it brought coal to Newcastle, Biblical rhythms and phrases that could only have further distanced Gibran from the American critic, already indisposed for other reasons toward Gibran, the gate-crasher on the American literary scene.

c - Thirdly, Eliot insisted that poets should avoid engaging in direct statements. Poetry should be allusive and suggestive or oblique.

But The Prophet consists of pronouncements almost all of which vio- late these recommendations.

They are direct statements that plum- met most of the time to the level of downright didacticism, and the reader could feel that he was being sermonized by Gibran, who speaks with the assurance that he had the "True Gospel." So much for the Establishment and for Eliot as the nemesis of Gibran.

In addition to what has just been said, there also is the fact that the American literary critic in his dismissive attitude to the author of The Prophet hardly knows anything about Gibran—the real Gibran, who was the foremost literary figure of Arabic literature in America, who revolutionized the course of Arabic literature in the Arab home- land, and who is still alive today in the consciousness of Arab men- of-letters and of avid readers even after a hundred years, thus illustrating Ezra Pound's famous dictum that "literature is news that stays news." If the American critic knew the real Gibran, his atti- tude would change or may change. Because then, he would realize that he is dealing with a true literary artist and The Prophet, what- ever its limitations, is a work of literary art in the strictest sense of belles-lettres.

But unfortunately, the gulf is difficult to bridge.

The " For this see the long chapter by Salma K.

Jayyusi in Trends and Movements in Modem Arabic Poetry (Leiden:

EJ.

Brill, 1977), Vol.

I, 91-107 and her short "Forward" (unpaginated) in Jean and Kahlil Gibran, Kahlil Gibran.

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326 IRFAN SHAHID Arabic works of Gibran are not open to the inspection of the American literary critic and no FitzGerald has yet appeared to render the Arabic works of Gibran into English as that Anglo-Irishman had done for Omar Khayyam.

II All the arguments of the American literary critic can be rebutted or at least faced with counter-arguments, despite the fact that there is an element of truth in them, which, however, is not such as to rel- egate Gibran to the limbo to which he has been consigned.

Categorization:

this lays Nietzsche himself open to the same objection because Thus Spake Zarathustra in spite of the difference in the outlook of Gibran and Nietzsche, is akin to The Prophet as the work of a German preaching to his countrymen what Gibran was to do in The Prophet.

And yet no one has objected to the form in which Nietzsche cast his thought and no critic to my knowledge has on that score refused Thus Spake Zarathustra admittance to the German Canon, where it has rightly rested as one of the glories of German, indeed, European literature.

As to its being a work more related to religious literature, especially of the Orient, rather than a secular work of art, the same may be said of one of the major works of English literature, namely, Milton's Paradise Lost, and yet no one condemned it on that score. When Eliot opened fire against Milton, it was not on that ground that he did so.

Eliot himself ended up almost speaking from the pulpit of the Anglo-Catholic church, and no one found his conversion or its lit- erary expression exceptionable.

The charge against Gibran of being romantic in the pejorative, dismissive sense is the easiest charge to rebut. Notwithstanding the prestige of the great poet/critic who advanced it, the Romantics are one of the classics of English and other European literature. Eliot's psyche may not have had a place for romanticism, but his was a strange and complex one, perhaps even morbid, and his Waste Land, the most celebrated poem of the century, was written while he was in a hospital in Switzerland, recuperating from a nervous breakdown.

But the overwhelming majority of human beings are romantics, at least at a certain stage in their lives.

Hence Romantic poetry is not factitious, contrived poetry, but one that answers to deeply seated Tradition, modernity, and postmodernity in Arabic literature : Essays in honor of professor Issa J. Boullata, edited by K. Abdel-Malek, and W.B. Hallaq, BRILL, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=253466.

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GIBRAN AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON 327 human needs and drives.

It is unfortunate that sometimes it degen- erates into mere sentimentalism that robs it of all emotional robust- ness, even manliness, as when one of its best representatives, none other that Shelley, says, "I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed." But this line is not representative and the "Ode to the West Wind" remains one of the gems in the treasury of English verse.

As to Gibran's failure to effect a revolution in the language through which he wrote The Prophet, this is a true observation.

But it should not so count against him as to deny him recognition as an American writer.

Few are the poets who can be credited with this achieve- ment.

It was done by the Romantic Wordsworth and he announced it in the introduction to his Lyrical Ballads, but English poetry had to wait for another century or so until Eliot appeared and effected a second revolution in the language of English poetry, with Whitman as a precursor. Between the two, all the Romantic and Victorian poets in England were writing in the same idiom that was bequeathed to them by the Romantics, and so they cannot be denied their place in the gallery of English poetry because they wrote in the idiom fashioned by their predecessors. Besides, English was not Gibran's native language, and as has already been said, he did effect a revolu- tion in Arabic; so it is extravagant to expect him to effect a second revolution in another language, especially as the circumstances of his life were not conducive to that.

For most of his life, which was rel- atively short, he consorted with his fellow Arab writers, and had no American wife, which would have ensured greater immersion in English.

And it was only in the last decade of his life that he wrote his English works, of which The Prophet was one.

Yet the English of The Prophet is attractive in its own way with its Biblical flavor, and can be appreciated for its effectiveness in employing a Biblical style, adapted to the taste of twentieth-century America.

A more fundamental reply to the indifference of the Establish- ment to Gibran may be the realization that the Canon itself is "a construct, fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain time."12 Such is the considered judgement of a distinguished 12 See Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory:

An Introduction (Minneapolis, Minnesota:

University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 11. I should like to thank my colleague, Professor John Hirsch of the English Department for some fruitful conversations on how the American Canon was formed in the forties and fifties, on the factors that governed its formation, and how the two Columbia anthologies of those days reflected it.

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328 IRFAN SHAHID literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, and there is an element of truth in this.

Aesthetic judgements tend to be subjective, governed by a vari- ety of non-literary elements or factors that go into their formulation.

Many are the works of art, literary, plastic, or musical, that have been condemned when they first appeared, were later recognized as masterpieces, and vice versa; many that have been acclaimed and hailed ended up in critical oblivion. This is not an attempt to dis- credit aesthetics and the impressive conceptual apparatus that philoso- phers, initially Germans, who have worked out its details.

It is only to say that there are cases when the Canon may be said not to be infallible and that in the case of Gibran's The Prophet., many were the non-literary elements that entered into the process of evaluation and that resulted in its exclusion from the American heritage fold.

Before I come to these non-literary factors and present three cases which by contrast illuminate these factors, I should like to refer to some authors who have been impressed by The Prophet.

The most often quoted is Claude Bragdon and his judgement appears on the jacket of copies of The Prophet.

It reads as follows:

His power came from some great reservoir of spiritual life, else it could not have been so universal and potent, but the majesty and beauty of the language with which he clothed it were all his own.

This evaluation apparently did not do Gibran much good in sophis- ticated literary circles and it may have done some harm in that it could convey to them the impression that The Prophet found no patrons to endorse its literary quality and advertize it on the jacket other than one who was not a member of the Establishment, but who was known more as an architect than as a bona fide literary critic.13 Gibran's admirers, however, were not limited to Claude Bragdon. None other than George William Russell, a major figure in twentieth century Irish literature, to whom the Dictionary of National Biography gives space almost equal to what is given to James Joyce, grew lyrical when he remembered The Prophet.

Here are samples from his chapter on Gibran:14 13 For some insightful comments on Gibran, see his chapter titled "A Modern Prophet from Lebanon," Merry Players (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1929), 139-147.

14 See George William Russell (also known as "AE.") in The Living Torch (London:

MacMillan, 1937), 168-169.

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GIBRAN AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON 329 Kahlil Gibran as well as Tagore has expressed the mystical faith of Asia ... I do not think the East has spoken with so beautiful a voice since the Gitanjali15 of Rabindranath Tagore as in The Prophet of Kahlil Gibran, who is artist as well as poet.

I have not seen for years a book more beautiful in thought, and when reading it I understand better than ever before, what Socrates meant in the Banquet when he spoke of the beauty of thought, which exercises a deeper enchantment than the beauty of form ... I could quote from every page and from every page I could find some beautiful and liberating thought...

I wonder has the East many more poets to reveal to us? ... It is only when a voice comes from India or China or Arabia that we get the thrill of strangeness from the beauty, and we feel that it might inspire another of the great passions of humanity.

George William Russell had no reason to flatter Gibran, and he was a fastidious critic possessed of an independent judgement and cer- tainly was not playing to the gallery. Some may say that his admi- ration was derived from the fact that he saw in Gibran a kindred spirit, in view of his interest in theosophy and oriental thought, but so was Goethe, the foremost German poet, who was deeply interested in the Orient, but this never militated against accepting his literary judgements; furthermore, Russell did have strong reservations about other oriental literary figures, so he was a discriminating critic who approached Gibran without any of the prejudices of the critics who denounced Gibran or damned him with faint praise.16 So much then for arguments and counter-arguments.

Now it is time that the non-literary elements or even factors that worked against Gibran and his acceptance by the literary Establishment are addressed.

These were disadvantages that plagued him:

a poor emigrant, who hardly spoke any English when he landed in America at the tender age of 12 and who lived in the Chinatown of Boston; he had no formal education, college or university, other than a biennium in school, when he went back to ground himself in his own native lan- guage in Beirut.

His intimate friends were his own Lebanese and Syrian literati17 who formed the literary circle called al-Rabita al- Qalamiyya, and not well-known established American men of letters 15 The poems that won Tagore the Nobel Prize in 1913.

16 Such as Stefan Kanfer; see The New York Times Magazine (June 25, 1972):

8ff.

I have been unable to find anything about Kanfer's background or identity.

17 For these colleagues of Gibran in al-Rabita (literally The Pen Bond), see the attractive chapter with vivid vignettes of its members in Mikha'il Naimy (Mikhail Na'ima), Sab'un (Beirut, 1964), vol.

II, 163-175.

On al-Rabita as the literary circle of the Arab-American writers, see Cornelis Nijland in "Al-Rabita al-Qalamiyya:

An Tradition, modernity, and postmodernity in Arabic literature : Essays in honor of professor Issa J. Boullata, edited by K. Abdel-Malek, and W.B. Hallaq, BRILL, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=253466.

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330 IRFAN SHAHID and literary critics. Finally, he did not belong to an ethnic group in America that had been well established in this country and that had discovered its cultural identity, let alone contributed to the cultural life of America.

If this had been the case, Gibran might have had the support of such a community and his image in the American literary mirror might have been clearer and better.

That these dis- advantages under which he labored were partly responsible for the cool or tepid reception which he received, or even were mostly responsible for the indifference of the literary Establishment to The Prophet, will become crystal clear when works of three European lit- erary artists are discussed, artists who had all the advantages he was denied, advantages that were partly responsible for their success and popularity:

Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, FitzGerald's Rubaiyat, and Eliot's Waste Land, and all three are related in one way or another to Gibran's The Prophet.

Reference has already been made to Nietzsche and how no critic found it exceptionable that he cast his thought in the form of a monologue, put in the mouth of the Oriental Persian Prophet, Zoroaster. Unlike Gibran, Nietzsche had every advantage of birth and education. Appointed to a professorship at the university of Basle while he was still an undergraduate, he taught classical philology there and so he belonged to the elitist German academic commu- nity, among whom the classicists were the aristocrats.

He could count among his friends Wagner and Schopenhauer.

And it was from his professorial chair at Basle that he began quite early in life his liter- ary activity as a man of letters and a philosopher, thus contrasting with Gibran, who alternated between Chinatown in Boston and a modest studio in Greenwich Village in New York.

Even more relevant and telling is the case of FitzGerald and the Rubaiyat.

FitzGerald studied at Cambridge where he met the novelist Thackery and through him, Alfred Tennyson, the future poet laureate, and later Carlyle.

So he, too, moved in the circle of the Establishment from the very beginning of his career. Even so, his translation of the Rubaiyat, the quatrains of a medieval Oriental poet, received no attention from the reading public; and the pub- lisher, who had advertised it for one shilling per copy, sold not a Arabic Literary Circle in New York," Bibliotheca Orientalis, 50, nos.

3-4 (1993):

329—341.

The life span of this literary circle ran for eleven years, from 1920 until 1931 when Gibran died and with him al-Rabita.

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GIBRAN AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON 331 single one for two years, 1859-1861.

When he reduced the price to one penny and put the pile of unsold copies in a bargain box out- side his shop, it was bought accidently by one, Whitley Stokes by name, who gave it to Dante Gabriel Rosetti, who in turn brought it to the attention of Browning and Swineburne, and from these it reached Meredith and finally Ruskin.

And it was thus, with the "blessing of the Pre-Raphaelites" that the popularity of the Rubdiydt was launched, through the endorsement of powerful critics and dis- tinguished Victorian poets.18 It was also in this way that the Rubaiyat received a new lease on life this side of the Atlantic, when a pow- erful and influential critic, none other than Charles Eliot Norton, who from his professorial niche at Harvard gave his blessing and ensured its popularity in America.19 Since then Omar and FitzGerald have become household words in the English-speaking world and many a phrase from the Rubaiyat have become part and parcel of the English language such as "I came like water and like wind I go," or "The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on."20 3.

Finally, there are Eliot and his Waste Land, published one year before The Prophet, and like The Prophet, a slim volume of some four hundred verses.

It became the most influential English poem in this century and even in the world, in spite of the fact that the poem has no independent existence since it is unintelligible without the notes which the author thought necessary to append, the curious medley of languages used in it, and the difficulty of following the argument even with the help of the annotation. Although the poem's 18 On this, see Dick Davis, Edward FitzGerald:

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Penguin, 1989), 40, and indeed the whole valuable introduction (pages 1—41), the most recent on the Rubaiyat.

19 In a long article which appeared in October 1869 in the North American Review, see also AJ.

Arberry, The Romance of the Rubaiyat (London:

George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 26, where the author quotes the enthusiastic passage from Norton's article that welcomed FitzGerald into the American literary scene.

The memory of Charles Eliot Norton is still alive today perpetuated by an Endowed Chair at Harvard University, which carries his name and with it the Rubaiyat he was the first to acclaim in this country.

For a detailed study of the Rubaiyat as the classic of all translations, see the present writer in his Inaugural Lecture, "Omar Khayyam:

The Philosopher-Poet of Medieval Islam" (Washington, D.C.:

Georgetown University Press, 1981).

20 Noteworthy is the fact that not a selection from the Rubaiyat, but the entire one hundred and one are included in works that are supposed to be anthologies, and this, in spite of the possibility of a selective presentation of them, since each qua- train is a self-contained unit of composition; see The Norton Anthology of English Literature (New York:

Norton and Company, 1968), Vol.

II, 1179-1190; cf.

supra, n. 6.

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332 IRFAN SHAHID power is undeniable, yet its immediate and wide appeal is partly owed to many extra non-literary factors that raised it to the pedestal upon which it has now rested for decades and that has kept it firmly in the good graces of elitist literary critics.

A quick enumeration will reveal the operation of these factors and currents, all of which con- trast stridently with those that ran against Gibran.

Eliot was born into an aristocratic family, a member of which had founded Washington University in St.

Louis.

He himself went to the leading school in the country—Harvard University—where he did his graduate work toward a Doctorate on the philosopher F.H. Bradley.

As if Harvard were not enough, he moved then to the Sorbonne in Paris and thence to Oxford.

Thus he studied at the three major universities of the Western world, moving in distinguished academic and literary circles, mak- ing acquaintanceships and friendships with everybody who was any- body in literature, among whom suffice it to mention the Cambridge Philosopher Bertrand Russell and E.R. Dodds, the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, both of whom remembered Eliot in their writ- ings, thus lending the prestige of their paramount place in Oxbridge academia to the reputation of the American poet. Like Gibran, Eliot was an emigrant from his country, who left the United States, settled in England, took British citizenship and became an Anglo-Catholic, thoroughly identifying himself with the ethos of the "Sceptered Isle" and writing on the English scene works such as the martyrdom of Thomas Becket in his Murder in the Cathedral.

Consequently, Eliot was wholeheartedly accepted by the English literary Establishment and this acceptance was reflected posthumously in a plaque for him, placed in that crowded precinct, the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

All this contrasts with Gibran's place in American society where he remained an outsider, who had no strong affiliations or connections with academic or literary circles that mattered.

No Ezra Pound in America endorsed his writings as Eliot's masterpiece Waste Land was, dedicated to il miglior fabbro, Pound, whose imprimatur of that poem launched it into that extraordinary course of unrelieved success and into that altitude from which it has never descended.

Perhaps the foregoing paragraphs have not failed to suggest, even indicate, that Gibran has not been treated fairly as an American writer.

The Prophet may not be an American classic such as Whitman's Leaves of Grass or Eliot's Waste Land, but it should have a place at Tradition, modernity, and postmodernity in Arabic literature : Essays in honor of professor Issa J. Boullata, edited by K. Abdel-Malek, and W.B. Hallaq, BRILL, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=253466.

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GIBRAN AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON 333 least in an American Heritage Anthology and be given a chance of being seriously considered by sophisticated literary taste in America.

The East, more specifically the Near East, has contributed three clas- sics to the Western World, that are, moreover, among the most widely read in Europe and America:

the Bible, The Arabian Nights, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

If The Prophet cannot be placed on the same pedestal as these three classics, it should not be too distant from the last, the Rubaiyat, and it is distinguished from the three by being not a translation, but a work of literary art com- posed not in Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, Arabic, or Persian, but in the language of the country, English.

And so it should be in the com- pany of those books that are the contribution of the Near East, in this case the Arab Near East, to the American literary scene.

This is not a call for the application of Affirmative Action to the literary arena, only a gentle reminder to the American critic to overcome nonchalance or indifference.

Those of us who are not guiltless of Arabic and who read Gibran's work in that language know that he is a genuine literary artist who, moreover, was truly inspired by more than one Muse.21 So when he chose to write in the language of his adopted country, he was and remained the same artist, but writing in a different linguistic medium, which in the considered judgement of fair and disinterested critics he had mastered.

The American critic, innocent of Arabic and Gibran's Arabic works, is faced with the problem of accepting a work, that is, The Prophet., which stands in splendid isolation, severed from all the background reading in Arabic, necessary for convinc- ing the critic that he is dealing with a writer of sterling value.

One way of bridging this gulf, or to start the dialogue that has not begun, is to have better translations of his Arabic works into English by those for whom translation is not a mechanical process, but an art.

It is extravagant to expect that any one of these potential transla- tors will be another FitzGerald, but hopefully, they will be within measurable distance from him. Even if this happens, it will not be the end of the encounter of the American critic with Gibran.

That critic must evaluate The Prophet on its own merits.

It will only be the 21 Gibran was an artist as well as a man of letters and his model was William Blake.

He painted and drew and was also a well-known portraitist.

Some famous personalities of the time sat for him, such as the poets Yeats, al-Baha , Masefield and Rabindranath Tagore.

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334 IRFAN SHAHID beginning of the dialogue when, in approaching The Prophet, this hypothetical critic will be relieved of an attitude to The Prophet, that had condemned it without appeal as being unworthy of even being considered.22 The most that one can hope for is that he will approach it with an open mind without any preconceived ideas.

Then and only then will the American literary critic realize or may realize that in dealing with Gibran, he is dealing with one of the true literary voices of the twentieth century, who represents the contribution of the Arab community in these United States to the American liter- ary heritage.

22 A step in the right direction has been taken by Eugene P.

Nassar.

See his chapter on Gibran in "Cultural Discontinuity in the Works of Kahlil Gibran," in Essays Critical and Meta-critical (Rutherford, NJ.: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1983), 84-102.

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